NDA compliance for pharmacy owners in Uganda: what actually gets checked

Pharmacy or drug shop — know which one you're licensed as

Uganda's National Drug Authority licenses two different kinds of retail outlet, and confusing the two is where a lot of compliance problems start. A pharmacy must be manned by a registered pharmacist and can stock and dispense the full range of medicines, including prescription-only drugs. A drug shop can be registered by another qualified health worker — a nurse, midwife, or clinical officer — but is licensed to sell a narrower range of over-the-counter medicines only.

Stocking outside what your license permits is one of the most common ways an outlet ends up on the wrong side of an inspection, before a single record is even checked.

What an inspector actually checks

Four things, in roughly this order:

1. Purchase records — who you bought from, what, how much, and crucially, the batch number and expiry date of every delivery.
2. Sales and dispensing records — for a pharmacy, this includes what was dispensed against which prescription.
3. The controlled drugs register — medicines classified as Class A, B, or restricted Class C drugs (narcotics and other restricted medicines) require their own record of every unit supplied, kept separately from ordinary sales.
4. Expired and returned stock — how you're documenting what's gone out of date and what you've done with it.

The controlled drugs register is where things usually break down

On paper, this sounds simple: log every controlled-drug sale in a dedicated book. In practice, it's the record most likely to have gaps, because it lives outside the normal sales flow. A cashier processes the sale at the till, and the register entry gets made "later" — except later sometimes doesn't happen, and the two records drift apart.

The fix isn't more discipline, it's less separation: the entry should happen as part of the sale, not as a second task after it.

Expiry is a compliance issue, not just a stock issue

An expired product still sitting on the shelf is a violation on its own, independent of anything else in your records. A simple weekly routine — reviewing what's within 90 days of expiry and pulling anything already expired — catches most of this before it becomes a problem, and selling oldest stock first (First-Expiry-First-Out) keeps it from recurring.

A routine that actually holds up

• Per delivery: record supplier, batch, and expiry before the stock goes on the shelf — a few minutes per delivery, not a backlog at month-end.
• Daily: someone responsible signs off that the day's records match what was actually sold.
• Weekly: review upcoming expiries, and check storage conditions for anything that needs refrigeration.
• Monthly: spot-audit the controlled drugs register and your fastest-moving products against physical stock.

Running more than one branch

Every branch needs its own independent set of records — an inspector at branch B isn't interested in branch A's paperwork. And stock moving between your own branches still needs to be documented as a transfer, not quietly absorbed into "stock on hand," or you'll have two branches whose books don't agree with either the delivery note or each other.

Where software actually helps — and where it doesn't

None of this is solved by buying software instead of doing the work — but the right system removes the gap where most of these records fall apart. SmarterPOS captures batch and expiry at the point of stock intake, flags products that require a prescription right at checkout, and its Expiry Report surfaces anything approaching its date — with a write-off you can action in one step instead of a separate manual process. An audit log records who did what and when, and stock transfers between branches are logged as an actual dispatch-and-receive workflow, not a silent stock adjustment.

It doesn't replace your controlled drugs register as a legal document, but it does mean the underlying data — batch, expiry, who sold what — is captured once, at the transaction, instead of reconstructed from memory later.

This is general information, not legal advice — always confirm current requirements directly with the National Drug Authority for your specific license class.